


Caught in a tide

by Tyellas



Series: Lab T-4 [8]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Drama & Romance, Ensemble Cast, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Medical Trauma, Mid-Movie Spoilers, Period-Typical Sexism, Quantum Mechanics, Songfic, Unresolved Sexual Tension, everyone gets a POV section, some blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 11:10:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13075635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: Events at Occam are picking up. It doesn't take long, just the length of a song, for everyone to choose where they stand about the Asset and Elisa. For friendship, possibilities, power – and that old black magic.





	Caught in a tide

**Author's Note:**

> Songfic: it's come to this already. Lyrics here are for Louis Prima and Keely Smith’s jazzy version of [That Old Black Magic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpjxx9BOm-0) \- the kind of big band classic Elisa brings to the lab.

Zelda’s finishing her night lunch. Someone had tried to grab her and Elisa from the table, come clean up T-4 right away, if you please. Elisa, bless her for real, had said she’d do it. Zelda had let Elisa take it on. She was starving, and her feet were bad, and it was the special curse time of month. Now Zelda’s feeling guilty, though her insides feel better for finishing a meal.

Lou eases over. Duane is trailing him. “Say Zelda, not to be bad luck but…there’s a bet going. That thing they've got up in T-4, the one that tried to eat a G-man…is it an alien? Or ol' magic like the Jersey Devil?”

Duane says, “I want it to be an alien. Win us the space race against the Ruskies.”

“You’re asking me?” Zelda makes them wait while she samples her Jell-O. “Never took a proper look. I get in, I clean, I get out!" Zelda knows, as she says it, she has been able to do that because of Elisa. If Elisa can be brave about cleaning next to that thing in the tank, it can’t be so awful. Maybe she’ll try and look at it next time. Preferably with Elisa there. She owes that girl a favor and a half.

Lou coaxed, “We know you’re s’posed to say that. We all are. But, just this once? Sugar on top? Got a pack of smokes riding on this!”

“Well. Without saying what I shouldn’t…” Zelda taps her spoon against the tray. “I am decided, and here is how. First, use your heads. It’s 1962. We are all working at a science place. Not some haunted mansion!" That gets a laugh. “I am a rational woman. I go to church. I keep up on the news. Maybe there may be things in this world that aren't from here. But what I do not believe in is – ”

_That old black magic_

_has me in its spell_

Elisa knows she doesn’t have a lot of time today. But she can’t come down to T-4 and see the creature without trying to do something pleasant. She signs _hello_ and lines up some boiled eggs on his tank’s edge. Next, she whisks out the little phonograph and puts a lively record on. Just a single, today. She likes the way the two musicians sing to each other in this one. And its beat will help her move.

_That old black magic that you weave so well_

_those icy fingers up and down my spine_

_the same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine_

_same old tingle that I feel inside_

Elisa tiptoes around the lab floor. It's a mess of water, tracks and footprints running through it. Equipment had been rolled in and out. The creature has stayed huddled in his furthest corner for longer than usual. He has finally unfolded and swum up for her. He knows, now, that she is a friend. She signs _hello_ to him again.

The creature drifts to the tank’s edge, engulfs all the eggs but one. That last one, he takes over to the glass, to nibble while watching her. He’s moving slowly today. His teal markings and golden eyes also seem dull. It could be the chains, which have been on him every time she's been in, lately. Or something to do with what came and left, here.

Elisa signs to him more than he can understand. _I have to work now. I hope you are okay._ He watches her keenly, trying to get the meaning. The same way her few friends, Giles and Zelda, do. She goes to her mop and bucket. After lifting the mop so he can see it, she signs, again, _I work._

It shouldn’t mean so much, a friend. This past run of days, Elisa has sprung up at her alarm for the chance of seeing him, nestled into her sleep mask to recall his sinuous movements. He’s not a normal friend by any definition, this being from a science-pulp story.  He’s as wordless as she is, and a thousand times more beautiful: like a dragon, a living enchantment, endlessly graceful. His mysteries are surely worth studying forever. She looks up at him from beneath her eyelashes. He is still watching her, treading water in place, reviving. Her lashes flutter over a delighted smile.

Elisa gets mopping, with a dance in her steps to give him something to see.

_And then that elevator starts its ride_

_down and down I go, round and around I go_

_like a leaf caught in a tide_

Hoffstetler’s on his way to T-4 to check on the water creature. Today’s research session had been unexpectedly taxing. A simple attempt to take some X-rays, the least invasive of procedures, had escalated into a battle of wills between Strickland and the creature.

Ahead of him, one of the cleaners nips inside the lab. Hoffstetler lengthens his stride to catch up. But, by the time he arrives, he hears music begin. He has a ten-second glimpse inside as the lab doors close. The water creature, under the influence of the music, is flowing to life, all strength and litheness. It is a different animal entirely from the one Strickland was goading earlier.

Hoffstetler stays outside, thinking. It is not the first time he has glimpsed this difference, or heard the music play. He knows what is happening behind the door. A pity that there is no way to bring the clever cleaner, or her innovations, into the project without risking his own cover. The best he can do for her is his true duty: as a Russian spy. The cleaner, one of the proletariat, is ignored and exploited by the Americans. In a more intelligent world, a Communist one, she might have her due.  

Or, as he is starting to suspect, her role as another power’s agent would be exposed far faster.

The song distracts him. _Old black magic._ Magic is a fallacy, spun from humans’ heuristic tendencies. The creature has emotions and some intelligence, very clearly. Hoffstetler has been reluctant to read too much into how the creature inspires him. For his own mental weaknesses want this being to fulfil his astrobiology ideas, the theoretical extremes that fall between hypotheses and dreams. His mind leaps over these frailities to the most advanced science.

Does the water being also have some ineffable quantum properties – does it reshape itself for its observer? Its circumstance? This might account for the unruly energy readings they receive from it. Its murky forces had interfered with today's X-rays. If so, they were trying to measure the unmeasurable, pin down what could never be captured.

Yet, if they could! The knowledge could open the door to more than physically enduring outer space. They could make outer space, where restrictions and terrors wrack cosmonauts, tolerable to the human mind. Or greet new beings from the void with true communion, not fear and hatred. The possibilities for the greater good make Hoffstetler’s brain reel.

He takes out his notebook and starts to write. For the time being, he and the cleaner have the same goal. Towards that, his intellectual’s privilege here is good for something. Occam’s staff will leave a man in a white coat who is writing alone. Even if he is inconvenient, rudely blocking lab doors. And whatever is happening behind the door to T-4, keeping this precious experiment thriving, can go on for a while longer.

_I should stay away but what can I do_

_I hear your name and I'm aflame_

_flame, flame of desire_

_only your kiss can put out the fire_

Strickland paces his office, crackling with adrenaline, waiting for the General’s orders.

Sally, his secretary, is supposed to put the call through. He glances out to be sure she’s in place. General Hoyt had implied that Strickland could help himself to Sally. He’s not inspired. Like every woman in this town, Sally makes herself ugly with an untouchable hairsprayed helmet of hair. Elaine has done it, too. His own wife. She hadn’t even asked his permission first. Goddamn Baltimore.

Strickland’s got bigger problems. The scientists still don’t have jack shit worth using about the Asset. Today’s X-rays better have that breathing apparatus breakthrough they’d promised. Strickland turns to a security screen to check that the Asset is still kicking.

The security cameras don’t play nice with the tank water. He manages to see a silhouette in the tank, darting fast. What the fuck? The Asset’s unholy screams from the research session still echo in his mind. He’d had to rev the cattle prod so hard he’d felt its burn in his right hand. After all that, it’s recovered already, slithering around in there, dark and strong and ugly as a man's sins. Unreal. Whatever that thing has, they need to harness it.

The red phone’s ring is a gut-punch. He scrambles for the desk. “General Hoyt! Tomorrow? Tomorrow’s perfect. Full intel and demo ready for you, sir. Two hundred hours, best for security. Sir, yes sir. Tomorrow.” The General hangs up.

Strickland hangs up, too. For one moment, the world is all right. At last, he gets to deliver.

The instant is fleeting. On the lab’s screen, there’s movement, _outside_ the tank. Has it escaped?

No. It’s the cleaner. Elisa. The mute. He watches. She’s not much to look at. Until she moves. Then, there’s…something. A swing in her step, like she actually enjoys her work. She’s getting in there and cleaning that lab, mopping up quick to get out.

Following his orders.

Strickland inhales.

He turns away from the monitors. His sharkskin suit, a second skin a moment before, has gone tight and hot.

After a half a minute, he smacks the desk with his right hand. Goddamn again. The jolt carries to his shoulders, triggering pain all the way to the hand mauled by the Asset. He gropes for a glass of water to down a pain pill, almost knocks it over.

He catches it in time. That would've been a mess --

Strickland smiles, very slowly.

He slides a pain pill into his mouth, swills it down. Then, he turns back to the monitors.

It’s not like there’s any pretty women in Baltimore. Might as well help himself to an interesting one.

_Oh you're the lover I have waited for_

_you're the mate that fate had me created for_

The creature is rapt. She has come.

The other two-legged ones, coming and going, are cold and shuttered. Even the light is strange and dead here. Her presence means that something besides him is alive in this place. She is the only one here who, to his senses, has nothing wrong with her.

Boredom and torment, here, have taught him that life is not one long moment: that time flows and eddies. She is, like him, interstitial, sliding in at times-between. She has learned him like the river creatures did. He has had to learn her. She brings motion, exquisite song-sound, living food. She dares to rest and feed, herself. She links her graceful movements to meaning, shaping the dullness.

Only she could revive him after the terrible thing. Under the two-legged lamprey’s dire shadow, he had fought, then surrendered. By now, he expected pricks and pulls and bloodletting. What had happened was far, far worse. There had been a binding caul, trapping his whole self, sucking his skin dry. Then, a hammering energy against his gills and lungs and heart. The force held killing poison. There had been no escape. Nothing to do but scream. That, too, had been taken from him when the lamprey pressed that sting against his voice box for his silence.

Now, she is here. She has sensed his misery and come. This time, she is more than beautiful with life. She sees him – truly sees him. She reflects his own emotions, his confused pain, his gladness at her presence. She hunts the dryness, tracking what has happened. The awareness of it dims her aura. Her grief is his. Now that she is occupied with his pain, he aches for her keeping her distance, her lost joy.

Knowing spears him. Her flickering stride is why he has been drawn to the two-legs ever since they appeared. It was worth becoming aware of time to see her move through it, changing moment to moment. To move through it himself, and come to this.

He had been waiting for this one. For her.

_And every time your lips meet mine_

The song is almost through its second round. Elisa wrings her mop out. The water that streams from it is tinged maroon. Among the wet tire-tracks striping the floor, there had been stars; spattered droplets of blood. It’s not getting better, what’s happening in here. She takes a rag and goes around for a final spot check.

Elisa steals a final moment up against the creature’s tank glass. The glass reflects her own face, crumpled with worry. Are they still punishing him for being fearful, sometimes? She knows what happens when people don’t understand each other. How could they not see that he’s like them? Maybe better than they are, if he’s so special?

It surfaces in her that they see, and they don’t care. Perhaps they never have. Like so many people never cared about her.

Elisa blinks at a shift in the glass. Her reflection is replaced with the creature’s striking face, his up close next to hers. He is on the other side, floating in front of her. Together, they smile. When Elisa exhales, she’s close enough that her breath mists the glass. The change startles the creature enough that he whirls back to his corner.

Elisa cleans the glass, fretting even more. She’ll do her best to come back a second time this shift. Sometimes she can't help her friends. But she has to try, or at least be there. If that's going to happen, she needs to hurry back to Zelda.

_Down and down I go_

Scribbling in the hallway, Hoffstetler roams inner and outer space. With his mind absent, he’s ambled ten yards from the lab doors.

_Round and round I go_

Watching from his office, Strickland anticipates tomorrow. It’s all waiting for him in that lab: the Asset, the cleaner, the future.

_In a spin, lovin' the spin I'm in_

Turning in the water, the creature shivers at the night’s extremes of pain and joy. He is curious, yearning, his hunger shaped by thought: for her.

_Under the old black magic_

Lifting the record, Elisa tucks it back into its cover, hides the little phonograph in her cart. As she goes, she blows a kiss at the creature. The last notes of the lively song echo in her.

_Called love…_


End file.
